


give me the lad that's gone

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [278]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Cousins, Deer Hunting, Friendship, Gen, Hunters & Hunting, past trauma, set post-chapter 5 of someone who no longer is, title from Robert Louis Stevenson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25613650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: “You’ve never liked hunting.”“I’ve learned to.”
Relationships: Anairë & Aredhel (Tolkien), Aredhel & Celegorm | Turcafinwë, Aredhel & Curufin | Curufinwë, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Nerdanel
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [278]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	give me the lad that's gone

Galadriel does not care much for the saucy children who, when washed and fed, remind Aredhel of smaller cousins, long ago. Galadriel is included in that count of cousins, and Aredhel aches to say so every time Sticks’ straw-pale plaits flash by.

“They are impossible,” Galadriel mutters sourly. “Children should be seen and not heard. They are heard and not seen; they get away so easily.”

Aredhel answers something, words through black water only she can taste and feel. Sometimes grief is like a lake filmed by the thinnest ice. A fingernail would scratch through.

(Argon did not die easily.)

Celegorm is elusive. There is a secrecy to his movements that Aredhel could be confident in sharing, once, but from which she is now excluded, along with the rest of the rabble not named _Feanorian_.

She ponders what she knows. It _is_ like him to be hangdog, sullen, an aimless thundercloud, whenever something is amiss. And what is _not_ amiss in Mithrim? Aredhel can’t see Fingon, doesn’t much care for Turgon’s company when her own patience is worn out.

She must find a chance and take it.

So—

“Take me hunting,” she says, leading with demand, when she sees him next.

(This is a gamble, of course, with Celegorm.)

He kicks back the bench opposite her, slumps down on it. Hand in his hair, elbow resting on the table. He looks as if he has not been sleeping much.

_You haven’t talked to me in days. Not really._

_I’m worried._

_Worried over you._

To demand is more childish than these platitudes, and thus, it seemed safer. He came to her, as she hoped, and now she waits for him to shake free of the restless cage of Mithrim with her. For Mithrim _is_ a cage, just as anything can be, even life itself. By that measure, the dead are free.

(She doesn’t want to admit that.)

Celegorm says, through his hair, “You’ve never liked hunting.”

“I’ve learned to.”

He considers. Rises. Whistles for his dog. Heads turn at the sound of that whistle, but Celegorm meets no curious gazes. She recalls that he rarely does, except in challenge.

Aredhel stands, too. When Huan trots up beside her, he licks the palm of her hand. Aredhel says, bright as morning,

“I’ll fetch my gun.”

He shakes his head. “You can’t use that.”

She balks. The gun has served her well, all this time. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to tell the world where we are,” he says. “Not if we can help it. Keep the piece for battle. It’ll come.”

She gnaws the end of her tongue, no retort springing. He’s right, but that leaves her weaponless.

“Don’t pout,” he says, with a flicker of humor in his eyes. She has missed that, both in him, and in Maedhros, whom she knew—whom she thought she knew—because of both Celegorm and Fingon. “I’ll find you something.”

Celegorm shows her where Curufin’s foolish little ground-bombs are planted, assuring her with a grumble that he has warned the children away from them. Then they scale the steep face of hill together. He turns, twice, to offer her his hand, but Aredhel does not take it. She has scrambled up as many bluffs and rock-ridges as he has, now. Come to that, she has braved worse weather, though this winter day is very fine.

“How far?” he asks.

They could be young again. Younger.

(He used to ask questions like that.)

“As far as we can,” she tells him, fingering the long bow that he acquired for her, and restrung to her comfort. “Out of sight of the fort, mind you.”

His first grin of the day—of the week, in her sight—answers that. “You don’t like being closed in, do you?”

“I don’t like anything, of late,” Aredhel says, and doesn’t say _since_. _Since_ the ice was scraped as thin as it could be without turning to black water. _Since_ that ice, though thin, had buried her.

“Save hunting.”

“Aye, well. You’ll find I have a keen aim.” Beren and Wachiwi have shown her a great deal.

No doubt this land will yield more beauty in flowering. The arid shoulders of earth will remain themselves, but they will be cloaked in hardy grasses, savage blooms, waving grasses. The fir trees will gild their dull December needles with summer sheen; the oak trees and shrubs will choke with leafy tongues.

For now, however, it is empty. A waiting land. Only the sky is beautiful: overhead, it is fringed with cold white clouds, spreading like lashes around the sun’s eye.

At the sight of a deer’s slim body, brown and red-brown in the glare, Aredhel gives Celegorm a signal without looking at him. Then she pulls the arrow to her ear, her heart to her ribs, and fires a clean shot.

Celegorm slings the carcass over his shoulders.

Aredhel looks at him, now pondering her victory, and determining what she will do with it.

They are quite far afield. She offered to carry the deer, but he wouldn’t hear of it. This leaves her hands free to swing, and her mind free to think. When they reach a clearing, Celegorm asks,

“Are you hungry?”

Aredhel is always hungry.

He hangs the carcass by its hooves from a high branch. The sun has climbed high, too. Celegorm dusts his hands against his thighs. When he hunts, he is all focus. All weapon. When the hunt is over, he is loose-limbed. Talking to Huan, turning his ear to Huan’s huffs and whimpers.

(Huan is silent when the hunt is on.)

They share some brown bread and a carrot together, which Celegorm scrapes clean and orange with his knife. They can’t delay long, but a quarter of an hour is not overmuch.

The air smells like blood. Huan gazes longingly at the fresh meat, but of course, he does not dare venture any closer than his master will allow. 

Aredhel finishes her spare luncheon spread and says,

“I want to tell you something.”

“What?” Celegorm says, demanding in his turn.

“You won’t like it.”

His brow knots. “A lecture?”

Her heart beats very fast. “No.”

“You didn’t used to lecture so much,” Celegorm grumbles, his mouth full of carrot.

But Aredhel did not lie when she spoke of her aim. “I saw your mother,” she says, and watches his face, this time, as the shot goes home.

Celegorm will never strike her physically, she knows. But she half expected him to flare; to burn brightly in anger. She did not expect the sudden chill—although, reborn of winter, she should have. She waits for him to speak, and as she dreads relentless cold, so she dreads his speaking.

“Why should you think,” he asks, in a voice that reminds her eerily of Curufin’s—not in depth, but in its sharp suspicion—“That I should want to hear anything of her?”

“Someone ought to know.”

Lost in black water, or in endless ice, or in a sun-bathed clearing with blood in the air—does it matter?

“And you chose me.”

“You’re my friend,” Aredhel says. She is brave. She knows she is. There is nothing left for cowards, in this world, and she has to remain in it a while longer. “I can’t tell Maedhros, in his condition. I wouldn’t tell Amras, or Caranthir, for fear it would pain them too much, and—”

“I am thicker-skinned, then?”

“You are strong.”

(She has to believe that.)

He digs in his pouch for something. Scraps of dried meat. He does not offer them to her; he gives them to Huan. His face is turned away, but she forges on, trusting that he listens.

“She was ill for some weeks. We found her still abed. She was very tired—and she was grieved. But they hoped she would improve. They _knew_ she would improve. It was not a fatal sickness, not at all. And my father assured her…I do not know what passed between them exactly, but—she intended to return, I think. To Grandmother.”

“Grandmother?” His voice is rough. His hand is on his dog’s head, the fingers flexing like insect legs. Sharp, inhuman.

Yes— _Grandmother_ , and she wants to say more, to say, _blood or no blood, if you had gone to her in all those years, she would have loved you, she would never have thought you stupid._ Above all things in this world, Aredhel knows that Celegorm fears and hates anyone who should think him stupid. Indis would have smiled on him with gentle interest; there would have been no reproof, no expectation. And Celegorm could have shown her what she loved most: news of secret worlds.

Aredhel says none of this. It would be too cruel.

“Indis. Father told her that Indis would be of aid to her.”

He scoffs, himself again. “She has Formenos, yet.”

“Oh,” Aredhel says, touched by a sudden longing for that place, though she knew it rarely, and then mostly through Celegorm’s eyes, “I suppose she does.”

He stands abruptly, startling Huan. He moves to cut down the deer. With his face practically against its white-furred ribs, he says,

“You were right.” Then, before she can inquire as to the unenviable grounds of her rightness, he continues. “You shouldn’t tell Maedhros. I won’t, either. It would do him better to never hear of her again.”

She pushes herself up. She steadies the deer as he cuts the twine around its hooves. She says, through the scent of blood, “Are you angry with me?”

“Not more than usual.”

How can she make him understand that it is her right to tell him of truth—or of hope, however distant? “My mother is dead, Celegorm. Fingon would say we buried her, but we didn’t.”

He is silent.

“The ground was frozen. We had only snow.”

“Ah,” he says. A drawn-out sigh. “You loved her better than I loved Nerdanel.”

She knows that isn’t true.

He hoists the deer up again. Says, “Keep an eye open for rabbits. Better than that, hares. We could use a few. Maitimo used to like the meat.”

 _Maitimo._ The name is soft in his mouth.

But Aredhel isn’t done hurting him. She is convinced, too, that the truth is a weapon like one of Fingon’s scalpels—it hurts to heal. “You might tell me what happened. How he was lost at all.”

“No.” There’s the blow. He’d strike it for his brother, not his mother.

Stubbornly, she says, “I’d like to know.”

“You’d always like to know, wouldn’t you, Ris? Playing as though you’ve a poker in your hand, and I’m a bed of coals. Alas, it’s not mine to confide.”

Amrod is dead and Maedhros is living. Feanor is dead and the rest are hiding.

Aredhel is not Fingon; she relinquishes her victory.

They shoot two rabbits. She does, that is, but he directs her, laden as he is with the deer. Huan helps flush them out. Aredhel doesn’t like to kill small quivering things, but she swore she did not mind hunting.

“Are you frightened?” Celegorm asks, voice low, when they dress their meat in Mithrim’s yard. “Of seeing him?”

All their way back to the fort, he was quiet. He spoke of rabbits, yes, and together they examined, hushed with caution, the remains of a campfire less than two miles from Mithrim. The remains seemed to disturb him as much as burnt bones would Aredhel.

But other than that, they shared little conversation. This is not, examined through the lens of their shared history, an anomaly. When they played together, as children, he ranted in stormy bursts or rhapsodized over his particular interests, but Aredhel did most of the talking.

This is not the question she was expecting, to break his silence.

“No,” she says. “I just didn’t think it was my place.”

“He’d prob’ly like to see you.”

She digests this. “We always got on.” She doesn’t say why. Through her brother and brother-cousin, she knew two halves of Maedhros, and both of them were loved. How to make sense of that, after the burned bridge? How to make sense of that now?

“I know.” He pierces the rabbit’s skin with his knife. It’s a sharp blade. Celegorm has always told her the importance of sharp blades; Curufin _made_ them.

Where is Curufin?

_I’m worried._

_Worried over you._

She never considered telling Curufin about Nerdanel; not for a moment. She would not expect much sympathy from him for Maedhros, either—at least, not what he would express aloud. Yet she is his friend, almost as much as she is Celegorm’s friend. Her prickly cousin has never been unreachable to her. One must only understand how to step carefully amidst his thorns.

If Celegorm has been elusive, Curufin has been downright absent.

_Are you frightened?_

No—not of Maedhros. Not of Curufin. Only of what hurts them. Like Celegorm, she must be strong.

Aredhel must put aside grief, step from her black water, and break whatever cages the living have wandered into, before she joins the dead.


End file.
